Bruins look to carry Coyle's magic over to Game 2

From feeling like the goat to being the hometown overtime hero, Boston Bruins forward Charlie Coyle ran the emotional gamut in Game 1.

What Coyle comes up with for an encore on Saturday night when the Bruins play host to the Columbus Blue Jackets in the second game of their Stanley Cup playoff series will certainly be interesting.

"His buddies probably expect him to get a hat trick next game," Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy joked to reporters.

Coyle, who hails from Weymouth, Mass. -- a coastal town just a few slap shots south of Boston -- has been an astute acquisition from the Minnesota Wild this season during the playoffs. He has a team-high five goals in eight playoff games this spring, including two in Thursday's 3-2 overtime win to kick off the second-round series with the Blue Jackets.

Then again, he wasn't feeling too great when a costly turnover led to Columbus's first goal early in the third, which set in motion a thrilling back-and-forth affair.

The Blue Jackets scored a pair of goals 13 seconds apart to take a 2-1 lead, but Coyle potted the equalizer with less than five minutes remaining in regulation and followed up with the winner little more than five minutes into overtime.

"Yeah, it's special. It's special personally, but it's all about the team here," Coyle said. "And I was glad after the turnover just to get the win, no matter how we did it."

Columbus lost for the first time in this year's playoffs, having swept the Tampa Bay Lightning in the first round, and looked very much like a team that had a long layoff. The Blue Jackets needed nearly seven minutes to register a shot on goal -- remaining in the hunt thanks to outstanding goaltending from Sergei Bobrovsky -- before finding their legs.

"Yeah, we had our struggles in the first," Blue Jackets coach John Tortorella told reporters afterward. "We found our game for a number of minutes there, but we just couldn't finish the game."

The good news for the Blue Jackets is they knocked off the rust in a game they were so close to winning, and have the extra motivation of knowing they can still steal home-ice advantage.

"It's tough, obviously, you know we'd like to get that one back there at the end of the third, but we didn't sit back afterwards," forward Brandon Dubinsky told NHL.com. "I thought we pushed them for the last five minutes of that period and into overtime. And it's overtime, anything can happen."

"That's the breaks of playoff hockey," Blue Jackets captain Nick Foligno said. "You've got to be as sharp as possible at all times. It's a good lesson for us."

Boston's win may have come with a price, though. David Krejci, who was on the receiving end of a thunderous check from Riley Nash, left the game in the third period and didn't return.

"I would rule him as day-to-day for now," Cassidy said. "It's not a concussion. He left the game and by the time he was available to come back, the game was over."

--Field Level Media